AFRO HAUS: DJs OWABOWA, KUYA RAIN and SARAH JANE RIEGLER at Revival Bar (783 College), Friday (September 7), 10 pm. $10-$15. (note: venue changed from Art Square Café)
HAUS ORPHEUS PRESENTS: SPEAK YA TRUTH at Art Square Café (334 Dundas West), Wednesday, September 19, doors 7:30 pm. $5.
Toronto trio John Orpheus fuse borders and genres with their uptempo African- and Trinidadian-inspired tunes and their newest video, Lost – which we’re premiering below – is no exception. But it still requires some context.
“We can’t tell you about the Lost video without talking about the Parachute video,” explains John Orpheus’s eponymous frontman during a meeting at an Ossington café.
“We shot [Parachute] in one day. The next day, we shot the Lost video because we had already rented all these expensive cameras and equipment. We just thought we should get more bang for our buck.”
While the Lost video, which is on their latest mixtape, GOATLIFE, arose from convenience, the Lost video has a strong yet simple creative vision – relaxed and dreamy where Parachute was full of energy and cuts.
“This was just me, Sarah and Chaenel.”
Orpheus refers to his bandmates, Sarah Jane Riegler, a Michigan-born, Ghana-educated drummer and DJ, and Chaenel Mattise, who assists on vocals. They join John Orpheus, the person, to make John Orpheus, the band.
“It’s about us and our chemistry with each other as friends and as bandmates.”
For Orpheus, it’s also a love letter – not to a person, but to the music itself. “I’ve given up all kinds of opportunities so that I could do my music.”
It hasn’t always been easy to find space for what they’re doing, and so beyond the band, Orpheus and Riegler also collaborate on Haus Orpheus, a collective and DIY event series run out of Art Square Gallery and Café across from the AGO.
“We have an amazing community and we wanted to put them on and showcase them, so Haus Orpheus was born,” recounts Riegler.
Currently, Haus Orpheus hosts Speak Ya Truth, a monthly performance art and spoken word open-mic, plus Haus Orpheus Presents and Afro Haus, a biweekly dance party that returns on Friday (September 7).
The latter was created to fill a void in the Toronto party scene. “There aren’t a lot of places that are playing genres like Afro-house, kuduro and gqom,” Riegler says. “We wanted to create a space where that was happening.”
Orpheus adds, “I am used to not fitting in to genres. For me, I’ve always had to make my own things so I’ve inherited the spirit of doing it yourself. I know music industry people, but they’ve never really supported what we’re doing. Our attitude is that if we don’t see it, we create it. How hard is it to just rent a room and do whatever it is that you do in it?”
Despite their optimism, the challenges facing the city’s DIY art scene aren’t lost on them.
“It is a really huge issue. We’ve seen so many amazing DIY and underground art spaces close this year,” says Riegler. “It’s really unfortunate.”
But while the DIY scene fights to stay alive downtown, the African music scene struggles to fully emerge to prominence. So why has it taken so long for Toronto to fully embrace African music?
According to Riegler, “People scoff at going more than half an hour out of downtown. You don’t go to Scarborough, Mississauga, Brampton or North York for parties. But there are African parties happening in all of those places.”
“They’ve been on the Afrobeats, Afro-house tip for a while, but they’re out in the GTA,” she continues. “Everyone stays in their own communities and we don’t have a great transit system that connects it all. So what we’re trying to do is bring that downtown.”
Between the band, the collective and the events, the Orpheus crew definitely has a lot going on, but all of their threads share a unified goal: celebrating Afro-diasporic music in the city and purveying it to the masses.
John Orpheus’s Lost leads this week’s #NOWplaying playlist of new Toronto music, which is streaming below. Subscribe here to get a new one every Friday.
music@nowtoronto.com | @sumikoaw
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